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According to PeHUB, Chicago-based startup GrubHub, a service that lets you order food for delivery or take out from local restaurants online or by mobile phone, has raised $50 million in Series E funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with Mesirow Financial, Benchmark Capital, Greenspring Associates and DAG Ventures participating. The company has also acquired New York-based food delivery network Dotmenu, the parent company of Campusfood and Allmenus. This brings GrubHub’s total funding to $84 million.

GrubHub gives its users access to food delivery service from more than 13,000 restaurants in U.S. cities including: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Denver and Boulder.

GrubHub is free for diners who order and pay for their meals with while restaurants pay commissions on each order processed. Restaurants that do not currently partner with GrubHub can still list their telephone numbers and menus for free. And of the 13,000 restaurant menus currently available on GrubHub, 5,000 establishments are paying GrubHub to manage and market a white-label online order and food delivery service.

Dotmenu has a foothold in menus and food delivery in the college market (with a presence in over 300 markets in the U.S.), and through the acquisition, GrubHub says it will have the largest restaurant listing platform in the country with 250,000 restaurant menus in over 50 major cities and college towns across the US. The two companies are projected to send over $225 million in combined order revenues to independent restaurants in 2011.

Benchmark’s Bill Gurley sais this of the deal and GrubHub: By combining its ability to aggressively scale its footprint and mobile platforms with Dotmenu’s proven leadership in college markets across the country, GrubHub is the clear leader in the online ordering space…This move will make GrubHub a household name, such as Benchmark’s other on-line portfolio companies OpenTable, Yelp and Zillow.

GrubHub founder Matt Maloney has a goal of taking GrubHub public, also following in the footsteps of OpenTable, which filed for an IPO “Going public is a very realistic opportunity for us within the next two years,” Maloney told us in March when the company raised $20 million.

At the time, Maloney said GrubHub had experienced a 300 percent increase in mobile food orders since last Fall and projects projects mobile orders to make up 20 percent of its total food sales by the end of 2011, which is compared to less than two percent in 2009 (mobile food orders accounted for 10 percent of total food sales in 2010).

The San Francisco firm intends to begin investing as early as the end of this year and late last month joined a syndicate of firms providing $24 million in funding to TechStars startups.

The plan is to use the Internet to screen companies and set valuations. Startups fill out simple application forms (find them here). Right Side responds with near instant feedback.

“As far as I know, we’re the only ones who are going to do this,” says Managing Director Kevin Dick, one of four partners.

The firm first began talking about the model last year and last month revealed itself as part of the TechStars group guaranteeing each startup at the incubator $100,000 in funding. (Also participating in the funding are the Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Avalon Ventues, DFJ Mercury, SoftBank Capital, SVB Financial Group, RRE Ventures, TechStars Alumni, and several individuals.)

Right Side presently is raising its maiden fund, says Dick. He declined to discuss its size or committed LPs. But he said the firm is on track to begin investing as early as this year. Right Side expects to invest in several hundred companies over the three-year investment life of the fund and in the process examine as many as 10,000 business proposals.

To apply for backing, startups take to the Internet and submit information about a founder’s background, a team’s experience and the startup’s game plan. “We came up with a simple checklist,” says Dick. No in-person interviews will be conducted because they don’t contribute to better investment decisions, he says.

Once the online forms are completed, Right Side responds promptly with a pre-money valuation estimate and a notice that if it were presently accepting funding requests it would seek financial projections, a business plan and additional details about a team’s background. Right Side hopes to provide a yes or no in two weeks.

The most important thing at the seed stage is people, says Dick. Did a founder go to Stanford University? Does he or she have previous experience at a startup?

Setting valuations depends in part on the size of the salary an engineer or founder might expect at an established company. But other factors include company performance, such as user growth at a Web site.

Right Side plans to use a standard term sheets for its deals with no required board seats and 1x liquidation preferences. Dick anticipates the average investment for companies he meets over the Internet to be $150,000. Average deals for incubator companies will be more like $50,000.

Proposed valuations may seem low to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, he says, but they will appear attractive to startups elsewhere in the country. Right Side hopes to cast a wide net for investment candidates.

With the proliferation of Blogs, review sites, Twitter, and many other platforms to encourage complaining, watching out for your on-line reputation has become, well, a nightmare. Users get irritated over tiny imperfections and start tweeting that your site is slow, doesn't do what they want, or whatever. Add the extra vitriol that some people display in on-line postings and the "Jane, you ignorant slut" comment from Saturday Night Live seems tame in comparison.

Assistly—which has roughly 1,000 customers, including many Web and mobile start ups such as Instagram, Klout, One Kings Lane, Spotify and Square—designed its freemium cloud-based software so that any company can sign up to start monitoring social-media conversations about its brand in a matter of minutes. Salesforce.com emphasized this ease of use in its announcement about the $50 million acquisition.

According to a recent post in Xconomy, Silicon Valley, where everyone says he’s out to disrupt the status quo, the sales force is a surprisingly resilient institution, especially in enterprise software. Every two to four years, companies such as IBM and Oracle produce new versions of their flagship applications, then send out armies of salespeople to persuade customers to upgrade.

Lewis Cirne, an entrepreneur who sold his business software company, Wily Technology, for $375 million in 2006, has become one of the most vocal advocates for a new type of leaner, faster business software maker. His latest company, New Relic, relies on just seven salespeople to serve more than 10,000 customers, who use its software to track the performance of websites. Cirne aims to sell his products to clients without doing much actual selling, in part by building software that is intuitive enough for a customer to install, test, and use without a salesperson’s help. Cirne claims it’s a better model for customers, who get to judge a product rather than a sales pitch, and it boosts profits. “At Wily, we were always chasing the break-even point because we had salespeople flying all over the place,” he says.

The sales forces at traditional business software companies spend days, weeks, and even months installing, explaining, and training customers on their products. To flip this model, New Relic has borrowed from the consumer technology playbook and made a product meant to provide enough visual pop to attract customers on its own. It’s also designed to be easy enough to use that customers can install it without the help of a knowledgeable salesperson. New Relic uses a cloud model, where customers gain access to a dashboard through their Web browser to configure and test the software. They’re then presented with a variety of colorful charts that break down the performance of their website. The product “has to be good enough that someone tweets about it,” says Cirne.

In the past, customers would install this type of software in their own data centers and use it in isolation. Because New Relic’s software lives in the cloud, every day 1.5 billion data points flow from its customers to a central online repository. New Relic’s engineers crunch the data and reach out to customers to tell them if they’re missing an important piece of information or not using a potentially helpful service. That “makes a lot more sense than talking to a traditional sales guy,” says Phillips.

“There are a number of startups out there that believe you can sell without a sales team,” says Asheem Chandna, a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Chandna has backed AppDynamics, a rival to New Relic, that uses the lean model for smaller customers but relies on salespeople to handle large ones. “At a certain point those customers want to look someone in the eye and have that direct relationship,” Chandna says. Kenny Van Zant, a former executive at SolarWinds (SWI), which adheres to the lean model, says that business software makers used to rely on “good PowerPoint and sales teams” to make up for a product’s deficiencies. But that “just doesn’t work anymore.”

For Cirne, the debate is personal. He’s a coder who stayed up through the night writing software in the early days of New Relic and still dedicates about half his time to programming. He says a sales-centric culture can be toxic. “That tiny fraction of the company gets the trips to Hawaii and the Rolex watches,” he says. “They come back all tanned with their wonderful stories, and it’s so deflating for the rest of the company.”